“... to the short duration of her chosen turning points. Aware that even decisive moments can hardly be self-contained, she often reaches back to investigate earlier precedents or to look into biographical factors. Even so, however, there are risks of oversimplification attached to this way of framing history. Like Zara Steiner, in her more recent study of the ...”

“... novel for adults, Springtime and Harvest, a dainty romance, was rejected several times before he self-published it in 1901, a year after his marriage to Meta Fuller, a childhood friend. It sold a total of two hundred copies. His next few books didn’t fare much better, and Sinclair was forced to move with his wife and infant son to a three-room cabin ...”

“... his wife divorced. This highly publicised tragic episode marked an end to the tradition of heroic self-experiment that had begun with Kleitman’s descent into the Mammoth Cave, and hastened the shift to laboratory-based neuroscience. In 1963 Dement moved to California and set up the Stanford Sleep Research Centre, which would become the model for the modern ...”

“... France)’, we have to assume that the parenthetical additions are marks of his impulse to private self-aggrandisement. One long paragraph unspools his imaginary employments: ‘captain in the Royal Netherlands Army, plant manager, attaché to the embassy in Peking, banker, clown (famous), painter (famous), archivist-palaeographer, midshipman (aboard the last ...”

“... Portugal, where his religion had been outlawed and even converted Jews were under suspicion. As a self-proclaimed political emissary, he posed a risk to anyone who welcomed him. Every time he travelled, there was a chance that his letters of safe passage would not be recognised. A pure grifter could have found less dangerous ways of making a living. But it ...”

“... no doubt burnished in Reminiscences.It is a tremendous read and a masterclass in carefully crafted self-deprecation as one of the most effective ways of boasting. Harrison comes across as an outsider who always offered a refreshing challenge to the insiders (the ‘Gladstone treatment’ is rolled out more than once); as someone who didn’t take herself ...”

“... of gall.’ He also observed, rather unkindly, that Cecil had been ‘a little blinded with the self-love of your own counsel in holding together of this parliament’. Even the king who owed him so much wasn’t convinced that Cecil held the key to the political process. Administrative skill wasn’t everything in early modern politics. Among those who ...”

“... eat and drink: all were determined by your fluid temperament. Dietetic knowledge was a matter of self-diagnosis, informed by your own appetites and routines. The governing rationale was analogy, a kind of thinking that made everyone both physician and poet. A popular manual declared that ‘Every sort of Food hath its operation in the Body, and on the ...”

“... Algeria diminished rather than enhanced French power, he became instead a resolute advocate of self-determination – putting down a coup attempt by the army and surviving assassination attempts by supporters of French Algeria – and accepted independence in 1962. He went on to try to reinvent French greatness yet again, by conducting an autonomous global ...”

“... coiffed, ultimate older sister’, possessed of enviable calm and seemingly preternatural self-assurance. Being with her was oddly soothing: ‘In her world, nothing was a big deal, and everything was just as it should be.’ She attended Melania’s wedding in Palm Beach: 350 guests attended, including the Clintons and P. Diddy; reportedly, the only ...”

“... and fled to Florence, avoiding the disastrous Essex Rebellion and its vindictive aftermath.In self-imposed Continental exile, he offered his services as an intelligencer on matters concerning the British Isles to Ferdinando I, grand duke of Tuscany, whose concern to see a non-Habsburg nominee succeed Elizabeth I prompted him to send Wotton on a mission to ...”

“... Russian context). Unlike nationalism, civilisationism is not principally concerned with political self-determination: one may want, as many Eastern European nationalists do, to defend political statehood within the framework of European liberal civilisation. The inverse is trickier. In theory, a civilisation may incorporate many independent states, though in ...”

“... remark, which Christopher Hilliard describes in A Matter of Obscenity as ‘the most famous self-inflicted wound in English legal history’. There is plenty of competition for that distinction, starting with Oscar Wilde’s ‘Oh dear, no, he was a particularly plain boy.’ Griffith-Jones, who regularly advised the director of public prosecutions on ...”

“... from Tory grandees to radical Quakers. He insulted the dying William Congreve by pooh-poohing his self-image as no mere playwright but a gentleman; he picked a fight with the clergyman-poet Edward Young by trashing a famous passage in Paradise Lost; he quarrelled with the Duchess of Marlborough when she attempted to recruit him to polish her memoirs; he ...”

“... a bad father, or a believing wife from an unbelieving husband. Age was superior to youth, and ‘self conceyted young men’ a constant menace. ‘The greatest number of Papists’ were ‘very yonge men’ and the most contentious Puritans were ‘for the most parte … men of yong yeeres & superficiall vnderstanding’. As for the common people, they were ...”